Thomas Jefferson on silent film

Today's New York Times has a fascinating article on crowd sourcing scholarly projects. The article, "Scholars Recruit Public for Project," can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/books/28transcribe.html

The article ends with a quotation from a letter by Thomas Jefferson, who was commenting on national documents destroyed during the Revolutioniary War. I think his thoughts might well apply to silent film and silent film history. "The lost cannot be recovered; let us save what remains not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.”